The announcement comes after the company revamped its digital media strategy by increasing its presence online and stating that it would ramp up its eCommerce activity.
Now, the French firm believes that social media and the new service opportunities it brings are the final facet of digital media, offering its brands the chance to stay in touch with customers throughout the purchasing process and beyond.
“The huge popularity of social networks opens up new opportunities to interact between our brands and customers. Overall, our brands have 20 million Facebook fans,” said L’Oréal’s managing director Strategic Marketing, Marc Menesguen.
Key in emerging markets
“We’ve seen that a growing number of consumers seek information on the Web before buying their beauty products.”
In China, the Lancôme team has developed a social platform called Rose Beauty by Lancôme, which is an online community for women in China with over 900,000 members exchanging beauty tips and come for advice from beauty experts.
“This platform is a great promotional tool for Lancôme that strengthens further its position as the leading luxury beauty brand in China,” explained Menesguen.
“It’s also a valuable source of real-time information for us. In all emerging markets, listening to our consumers while on social networks allows us to better understand their expectations and drive our development effort in these new frontiers.”
Global connection
A further example of how the company has utilised social presence to interact with consumers is in Germany, where the L’Oréal Paris brand produces explanatory videos in response to the queries most frequently submitted by the country’s search engines.
In Brazil, L’Oréal Paris has assembled a community of 2.5 million fans, which the marketing chief claims has taken the brand to a new level of dynamism in the country.
The Group has ensured that its digital rollout has been utilised and professionalised to its fullest by setting up a set of KPIs to measure the return on investments and also to identify best practices and spread them throughout the company.
“We will continue this digital transformation in 2012 to strengthen our model as number one in beauty and we know that the next billion consumers to be won over will be young and digital native,” concluded Menesguen.